In the three years since Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin first described the Biden Administration’s commitment to “integrated deterrence,”[1] America’s authoritarian adversaries have seized the initiative. The hallmarks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s proxy war against Israel have been both the atrocities committed by the aggressors and the emergence of an entente of revisionist powers, including China and North Korea, that has enabled their aggression.[2] Combined, these powers are on track to deploy a nuclear force that more than doubles that of the United States by this decade’s end.[3] A recent joint patrol by Russian and Chinese strategic bombers underscored the dangers that lie beyond that threshold.[4] In the meantime, both Russia[5] and Iran[6] carry out terror campaigns against the West while China dials up its threats against Taiwan and the Philippines.[7] From the gray zone to the strategic nuclear balance, the U.S. deterrence posture is eroding.
Given this stark reality, the “integrated deterrence” concept, once highlighted in both the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy, may be unsalvageable.[8] The administration’s critics have long warned that integrated deterrence was just an attempt to substitute “non-military tools” for military power,[0] or simply decried the rubric as a meaningless “platitude.”[10] More sympathetic observers have fainte ly praised the idea as “not so bad.”[11] In recent reports, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States found “little evidencof [the concept’s] implementation across the interagency,”[12] while the Commission on the National Defense Strategy “found few indications that it is being consistently pursued.”[13] Despite these critical assessments, both bodies emphasized the need to integrate what the latter called “all elements of national power” in order to restore deterrence or prevail in the event of conflict.[14] In other words: integrated deterrence is dead, long live integrated deterrence.
As today’s policymakers contemplate how to better integrate the elements of national power and restore deterrence, they can learn much from their Cold War predecessors. They also grappled with the emergence of new warfighting domains, the sudden loss of U.S. military advantages, and the dilemma of integrating the instruments of national power without diluting their potency. Their hard-learned lessons about the difficulty of solving deterrence problems, the importance of preserving allied assurance, and the value of integrating through addition rather than substitution may usefully inform these efforts going forward.
Lesson 1: Deterrence Problems are More Readily Identified than Resolved
The Biden Administration’s “integrated deterrence” rubric did not appear from thin air. Rather, the term followed years of debate about how the United States should respond to both “gray zone” threats when the stakes may be “too small” to risk great power war[15] and the emergence of “cross-domain threats” in cyberspace and outer space that could implicate the nuclear balance.[16] Concerns about gray zones and disruptive technologies were familiar to policymakers during the early Cold War, when the Eisenhower Administration’s “New Look” strategy was eroded by the extension of the Cold War into new geographical and warfighting domains.
Eisenhower’s New Look sought to leverage the threat of “massive [nuclear] retaliation” to both deter the Soviet Union and tame defense spending.[17] One of the strategy’s leading critics was General Maxwell Taylor, who served as Army Chief of Staff between 1955 and 1959. Taylor warned that in the approaching “era of atomic plenty [and] mutual deterrence, the Communists will probably be inclined to expand their tactics of subversion and limited aggression.”[18] In such a world, the United States required a “capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge” because it is “just as necessary to deter or win quickly a limited war as to deter general war.”[19] After all, he argued, limited aggression “if resisted with inadequate means… may expand into the general war that we are most anxious to avoid.”[20]
Taylor’s critique of the New Look was parochial. After all, the Army had been almost halved in size to facilitate spending on the Air Force and Navy’s strategic nuclear build-ups.[21] His critique was nonetheless compelling. Massive retaliation did not likely provide a credible response to either brushfire wars in the Third World or limited aggression directed at such flashpoints as Berlin, South Korea, or Taiwan. The benefits of possessing a sufficient “capability to react across the entire spectrum of possible challenge,” as Taylor urged, are as evident today as seventy years ago. Nonetheless, the Army’s attempt to operationalize Taylor’s vision of deterrence during the 1950s indicates how wide a gap can separate a deterrence concept from its execution.
Taylor’s vision hinged on the Army’s ability to prevail on the nuclear battlefield without a civilization-ending strategic nuclear exchange. A former paratrooper, he argued that “all Army units must be trained for all-around combat in the same way that we trained and fought our airborne divisions in WWII,” with ground commanders prepared to find the enemy and “destroy him by directing atomic fire upon him, using his own organic weapons or calling down the fire of distant missiles deployed in the rear.”[22] In this conception, tactical nuclear weapons were “viewed not as small-scale strategic bombs, but as artillery of unprecedented effectiveness.”[23] Taylor oversaw the fielding of such weapons systems as the nuclear-capable “Atomic Annie” field gun and the “Davy Crockett” recoilless gun that launched a projectile with a yield with just one tenth of one percent of the Hiroshima bomb.
All this effort, however, unearthed new obstacles. A notional tactical atomic exchange during one field exercise at Fort Polk in 1955 “would have destroyed the army forces and killed most if not all inhabitants of Louisiana.”[24] The following year, the 355 notional atomic weapons employed in another NATO field training exercise would have resulted in almost two million West German civilian casualties.[25] When reorganized along Taylor’s “pentomic” design, the Army’s divisions were left undermanned and unprepared for non-nuclear, combined arms combat.[26] Finally, the transition to atomic age equipment exceeded the technical aptitude of a conscript-based Army, creating a dilemma that one general officer tersely described: “Push button trucks may be easier for idiots to operate, but they require geniuses to maintain.”[27]
As convincing as Taylor’s critique of the New Look may have been, the Army was simply unable to implement his proposed alternative during the 1950s. Whether or not the Army could have resolved the doctrinal, material, and personnel problems presented by battlefield nuclear warfighting proved immaterial as the United States pivoted away from the concept in the 1960s. Washington was left hoping that Moscow would join it in forgoing the early, large-scale use of tactical nuclear weapons if war broke out in Europe.[28] Interviews conducted after the Cold War suggest that Moscow would not have been so forbearing, and the Army’s decades-long struggle to come to terms with the nuclear battlefield indicates how persistent a deterrence gap may prove.[29]
Lesson 2: Don’t Neglect Allied Assurance
President John F. Kennedy embraced Maxwell Taylor’s “Flexible Response” rubric,[30] but Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his “whiz kid” advisors saw little value in Army’s efforts to fight and win on the nuclear battlefield.[31] They instead focused on developing options for a “controlled response”[32] in which the United States could rely on limited nuclear strikes followed by negotiating pauses to restore intra-war deterrence and end a crisis or conflict on acceptable terms.[33] This new emphasis drew on the work of leading intellectuals at the RAND Corporation and, when compared to massive retaliation, promised a fine-tuned approach to deterring Soviet aggression.[34] It also proved to be wholly impracticable in the 1960s and a nightmare for allied assurance.
McNamara’s early efforts culminated in a May 1962 speech at a NATO ministerial meeting in Athens, Greece. There he described U.S. preparations to carry out “a controlled and flexible nuclear response in the event that deterrence should fail.”[35] Three corollaries would extend Flexible Response to NATO: (1) building up conventional forces so as not to be compelled to “initiate the use of nuclear forces” in response to a limited Soviet attack; (2) rejecting France’s plan to deploy what McNamara disparaged as “weak nuclear capabilities, operating independently;” and, (3) minimizing reliance on tactical nuclear weapons, except as a “next-to-last option” given the likelihood of escalation to a general nuclear war. [36] McNamara argued that Flexible Response offered NATO a seamless web of deterrent capabilities, reliant first on conventional forces and backstopped by U.S. theater, and ultimately, strategic nuclear forces.
The Athens speech elicited a neuralgic response from the European allies, who feared that McNamara’s emphasis on conventional forces made war more rather than less likely. France, the United Kingdom, and Germany were “unwilling to consider any meaningful ‘flexibility’ on any use of nuclear weapons except in the context of strategic nuclear exchange… insist[ing] on a concept of ‘trip-wire’ in which any crossing of a geographic line would automatically trigger ‘total nuclear response.’”[37] Germany’s defense minister expressed his concern that a NATO commitment to “meet a conventional attack… with conventional weapons alone was the ideal invitation for an aggressor to attempt such an attack knowing that it would not be as dangerous.”[38] France pressed ahead with its independent force de frappe, which was viewed in Paris as “a cheap finger on the American nuclear trigger.”[39] To many in Europe, McNamara’s approach risked delinking the continent from the U.S. strategic deterrent, rather than enhancing its credibility.
European mistrust was well founded. The U.S. military was simply not able to implement Flexible Response in the 1960s. As early as April 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned McNamara that “we do not now have the requisite capabilities for carrying out a doctrine of controlled responses and negotiating pauses” and that “attempts at the present time to implement such a doctrine… would be premature and could gravely weaken our deterrent posture.”[40] The chiefs expressed specific concern over a brittle nuclear command and control (NC2) system, the stringent target acquisition requirement associated with limited nuclear employment, and the difficulty of conducting battle damage assessments following any initial exchange. A later study of NC2 capabilities largely sided with the chiefs’ concerns, noting that although “the [National Military Command System] established during the 1960s was a major advance… it was hardly designed to satisfy the functional requirements of flexible response.”[41]
For his part, McNamara soon rejected the logic of Athens. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, he came to believe that “assured destruction is the very essence of the whole deterrence concept”[42] and looked forward to the day that the Soviets would possess sufficient strategic nuclear forces to establish “a more stable ‘balance of terror.’”[43] He lobbied privately[44] for a nuclear no-first use posture that he would later endorse publicly,[45] and which if adopted, would have undermined U.S. extended deterrence commitments around the globe.
NATO formally endorsed the “Flexible Response” rubric in late 1967, but that move did little to resolve transatlantic mistrust. One relatively sympathetic observer noted that “by asserting the continuity of the conflict spectrum, and grounding deterrence in the risk that any confrontation, however small, might – but need not – escalate to total war, Flexible Response satisfied both European insistence on the centrality of the strategic nuclear deterrence and the U.S. desire to hedge the risk of its use.”[46] Dennis Healey of the United Kingdom observed more bluntly that “[n]o-first-use would have been McNamara’s objective, whereas the Europeans believed that nuclear deterrence gave deterrence on the cheap.”[47] Lawrence Freedman ultimately concluded that the concept’s “prime political attribute – that it can mean all things to all men – is a serious military failing.”[48]
Beginning in the early 1970s, a series of breakthroughs would breathe new life into the possibility of carrying out a combination of controlled nuclear responses and negotiating pauses.[49] These efforts strengthened the U.S. extended deterrence posture vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, but the damage to allied assurance was done. The Soviet Union’s deployment of theater-range SS-20 missiles in 1976 kicked off the “Euromissile” that would push NATO’s political cohesion to the brink over the next decade.[50] The Flexible Response episode remains a cautionary tale about the difficulties of assuring allies once a deterrence gap has been revealed.
Lesson 3: Integrated Deterrence Should be Additive, not Substitutive
A far more successful model for integrating the elements of national power can be found in President Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of a deceptively simple Cold War strategy: “we win and they lose.”[51] Reagan’s approach was spelled out in his administration’s National Security Strategy, which called for the “integration of… diplomatic, informational, economic/political, and military” strategies that “thoroughly integrated and complement the other elements of U.S. national power.”[52] When dealing with the Soviet Union, those elements of national power would be employed to advance “external resistance to Soviet imperialism; internal pressure on the USSR to weaken the sources of Soviet imperialism; and negotiations to eliminate, on the basis of strict reciprocity, outstanding disagreements.”[53] This approach formed the basis of a “comprehensive strategy… pursuing the Soviet Union’s negotiated surrender.”[54]
The Reagan strategy’s fulcrum was a major defense buildup following a decade of budgetary neglect.[55] Having inherited an approximately $150 billion defense budget, the administration grew defense spending by some $20 billion per year through its first term.[56] This surge of funding would have been wasted without a guiding vision, which as stated by the White House, was to “modernize its military forces – both nuclear and conventional – so that… Soviet calculations of possible war outcomes under any contingency must always result in outcomes so unfavorable to the USSR that there would be no incentive for Soviet leaders to initiate an attack.”[57] The disparate elements of the Reagan strategy combined to meet that goal.
The modernization of strategic and theater nuclear forces was the administration’s “first priority”[58] and one of its most hard-fought issues before the first Pershing II missiles were deployed to Europe in 1983 and Congress funded the Peacekeeper ICBM in early 1985.[59] Even more dramatic was Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in March 1983, which proposed a radical shift from “the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack” to a missile shield for the United States and its allies.[60] The SDI has been characterized as the “apotheosis” of the Reagan defense buildup, since it demonstrated the U.S. “capability to overmatch the Kremlin’s quantitative edge in troops, tanks, aircraft, missiles, and ships.”[61] No aspect of the Reagan strategy more dramatically “highlighted the Soviet Union’s lag in computers and microelectronics.”[62]
During the 1980s, the United States paired its technological edge with novel operational concepts in order to strengthen the contribution of conventional forces to deterrence. The Army and Air Force’s major contribution was the development of the AirLand Battle concept, which relied on a combination of intelligence, surveillance, long-range artillery, and tactical air support required to “extend the battlefield” and destroy Soviet second echelon forces before they could reach the intra-German frontier.[63]
For its part, the U.S. Navy transformed itself during the 1980s into an offensive striking force that would hold Soviet ballistic missile submarine bastions in the Barents Sea and Sea of Japan at risk.[64] The approach was summarized by Admiral James Lyons: “One of the messages we intended to send was—you will never get to your missile launch point. And that’s deterrence!”[65] A senior Soviet official agreed with that assessment, noting that the Soviet Navy re-tasked its “attack submarines to defend the strategic ones in the Barents Sea” rather than stalk U.S. carriers and strategic missile submarines as prescribed in its preferred strategy.[66]
Concurrently, the Reagan Administration worked toward its stated goal of employing “the other elements of U.S. national power” beyond the military. Unlike the 1950s and 1960s, when the Soviet Union backed anti-colonial insurgencies throughout the Third World, the USSR was itself the world’s foremost imperial power in the 1980s. The United States backed anti-communist guerillas from Angola to Afghanistan, which Moscow spent billions of dollars each year to suppress.[67] The CIA struck at the heart of the Soviet empire through the provision of covert funding and non-lethal support to the anti-Soviet opposition in Poland.[68] Washington also engaged in economic warfare, tightening the sanctions regime on Moscow while purposefully allowing sabotaged equipment to slip through the cracks.[69]
The Reagan strategy imposed unrelenting pressure on Moscow that eventually compelled Mikhail Gorbachev to fulfill Reagan’s vision of a Soviet leader who was willing to retire from the Cold War. In pursuit of that outcome, the administration created operational problems that undermined Moscow’s confidence that it could prevail in any conflict. Moreover, Washington dictated the pace by which the competition would take place in the gray zones and new domains. Finally, the breadth of the Reagan strategy allowed the administration to avoid relying too much on any one capability for deterrence.
Conclusion
These failures and successes of Cold War deterrence strategies offer several insights for revitalizing deterrence today.
The fate of the New Look and Flexible Response strategies highlight the gap that can separate the recognition of a deterrence challenge from its resolution. Both Taylor and McNamara’s concepts of “Flexible Response” ended in strategic cul-de-sacs. Given that risk, policymakers should prioritize the development of new capabilities with which to meet emergent deterrence challenges. Such efforts should include air and missile defense in response to the threat of coercive attacks by Russia and China,[70] as well as the deployment of ground-based intermediate-range, conventional missiles that can hold Russian and Chinese targets at risk during a conventional conflict.[71] This task demands both urgency today and the patience required to let such investments pay off over time.
The backlash against McNamara’s Flexible Response in the 1960s, by contrast, underscores the importance of maintaining allied assurance in America’s security guarantees. In recent years, the Obama Administration needlessly harmed its allied assurance posture by retiring the nuclear-armed, sea-launched Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which was valued by Japan, South Korea, and other allies in Asia.[72] Congressional opposition prevented the Biden Administration from repeating a similar mistake in regard to the nuclear-armed Sea-Launched Cruise Missile.[73] Although conventional forces have taken the dominant role in U.S. deterrence posture since the end of the Cold War, using the “integrated deterrence” rubric to rashly reduce the role of nuclear weapons in U.S. strategy, such as by adopting a nuclear no-first use policy, would increase the risks of both deterrence failure and nuclear proliferation.[74]
The Reagan Administration’s approach demonstrates the advantages of a comprehensive and additive deterrence strategy over a substitutive one. The Reagan strategy presented the Red Army and its political leadership with one military, political, or diplomatic dilemma after another. Despite the purportedly bipartisan conviction that the United States faces a period of reinvigorated great power competition, there is little appetite in Washington to contemplate a similar effort today. In its recent report, the Commission on the National Defense Strategy offered an essential blueprint for how the United States could reinvigorate the elements that were central to the Reagan strategy, to include an immediate defense supplemental, prioritizing defense programs according to battlefield utility, and “spending that puts defense and other components of national security on a glide path to support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.”[75]
“Integrated deterrence” may have outlived its usefulness as a policy rubric. Like the more than 60-year-old concept of “Flexible Response,” however, the phrase speaks to the need to deter and compete with adversaries who threaten U.S. interests through an ever-evolving combination of domains, methods, and means. Contemporary policymakers will do well to revisit the successes and failures of their forebears as they contemplate the challenges ahead.
